The Importance of Story

31 Aug 2011

I have recently been trying to figure out life. Not in any sort of deep way, just trying to figure out where I am headed… or at least the direction I should go next. Whenever you try and figure out where your life is going you tend to look at where you have been so far and use that as a basis for where you are leaping off too next. Typically you look back and have a few momments of “Well Crap I shouldn’t have done that”. As I look back I didn’t see very many of those. And the ones I did see had more to do with accruing debt then actual life altering mistakes.

I think that we should judge our success in life not based on money or power or anything like that, I think we should judge our success based on how much fun we have talking about what we have done in the past. For instance: I started entertaining people for money and studying clowning when I was 15 years. That means that I have 15 years of experience making people laugh, which is half of my life. On top of that I am(though it may have expired at this point) a certified commercial diver, a real estate agent (though my liscense isn’t currently active) and on top of all that I also like to draw.

All of these things lend themselves to having a really strange resume and can make getting jobs difficult. It is hard to explain to someone how being lead tender on a dive crew demonstrates leadership or how being an entertainer makes you good at sales. But it does.

Back to figuring out life. I have been working for an office store in retail sales and while I enjoy the people and helping them become more awesome it isn’t an awesome part of my story. Recently I have been lucky enough to start working for a start-up in Boulder and that has introduced me to an entirely new world of insanity. This is where I want the next part of my story to be from. I don’t want to be that guy who had a fun and crazy life when he was younger and then packed it in and worked retail. I want to create something that people enjoy… or alternately be able to live like a rich person with out resorting to a life of crime.

The question is how: How do I bring to bear all of my vast experiences into something more? That is what I am working on and I can say that I have no idea how I am going to do that. Working for a crazy start-up has taught me one important lesson that I think everyone should learn. ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE. I’ll say it again, this time bold. **ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE. **Don’t let life hold you back, don’t let your ideas be limited by what you have been told is possible. Believe that anything is possible, it just takes work. Lots of it. I haven’t even started focusing on one idea but I have seen the amount of work that goes into realizing an idea and can say that it isn’t for the faint of heart.

I am standing up, right now, and saying that I will not fade into mediocrity. I will become something, not sure what yet, but I will become it. Wish me luck.